HE WAS THE son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once
owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion
Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the
town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and
the blinds to all of the windows facing the road were
kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of
chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in
the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his
mother in those days and when he was a young boy
went to school at the Winesburg High School. Old
citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth
inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the
road when he came into town and sometimes read
a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to
make him realize where he was so that he would
turn out of the beaten track and let them pass.
When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went
to New York City and was a city man for fifteen
years. He studied French and went to an art school,
hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In
his own mind he planned to go to Paris and to finish
his art education among the masters there, but that
never turned out.
Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He
could draw well enough and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might
have expressed themselves through the brush of a
painter, but he was always a child and that was a
handicap to his worldly development. He never
grew up and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him.
The child in him kept bumping against things,
against actualities like money and sex and opinions.
Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against
an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of the
many things that kept things from turning out for
Enoch Robinson
In New York City, when he first went there to live
and before he became confused and disconcerted by
the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with
young men. He got into a group of other young
artists, both men and women, and in the evenings
they sometimes came to visit him in his room. Once
he got drunk and was taken to a police station
where a police magistrate frightened him horribly,
and once he tried to have an affair with a woman
of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging
house. The woman and Enoch walked together
three blocks and then the young man grew afraid
and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall
of a building and laughed so heartily that another
man stopped and laughed with her. The two went
away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to
his room trembling and vexed.
The room in which young Robinson lived in New
York faced Washington Square and was long and
narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that
fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the
story of a room almost more than it is the story of
a man.
And so into the room in the evening came young
Enoch's friends. There was nothing particularly
striking about them except that they were artists of
the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking
artists. Throughout all of the known history of the
world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They
talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly,
in earnest about it. They think it matters much more
than it does.
And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from
the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in
a corner and for the most part said nothing. How
his big blue childlike eyes stared about! On the walls
were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in
their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads
rocking from side to side. Words were said about
line and values and composition, lots of words, such
as are always being said.
Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how.
He was too excited to talk coherently. When he tried
he sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded
strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop
talking. He knew what he wanted to say, but he
knew also that he could never by any possibility
say it. When a picture he had painted was under
discussion, he wanted to burst out with something
like this: "You don't get the point," he wanted to
explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist of the
things you see and say words about. There is something else, something you don't see at all, something
you aren't intended to see. Look at this one over
here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that
you might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning
of everything. There is a clump of elders there such
as used to grow beside the road before our house
back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders
there is something hidden. It is a woman, that's
what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and
the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see
how the old man who drives a cart looks anxiously
about? That is Thad Grayback who has a farm up
the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be
ground into meal at Comstock's mill. He knows
there is something in the elders, something hidden
away, and yet he doesn't quite know.
"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a
woman and, oh, she is lovely! She is hurt and is
suffering but she makes no sound. Don't you see
how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and
the beauty comes out from her and spreads over
everything. It is in the sky back there and all around
everywhere. I didn't try to paint the woman, of
course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull
to talk of composition and such things! Why do you
not look at the sky and then run away as I used
to do when I was a boy back there in Winesburg,
Ohio?"
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson
trembled to say to the guests who came into his
room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then
he began to doubt his own mind. He was afraid
the things he felt were not getting expressed in the
pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he
stopped inviting people into his room and presently
got into the habit of locking the door. He began to
think that enough people had visited him, that he
did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he
could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits
of men and women among whom he went, in his
turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and
change to suit his own fancy, something that understood all about such things as the wounded woman
behind the elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not
want friends for the quite simple reason that no
child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could
really talk, people he could harangue and scold by
the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold.
They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions
of their own, but always he talked last and best. He
was like a writer busy among the figures of his
brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-
dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of
New York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to
get lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-
bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind. At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a girl who
sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and
went to live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two
children were born to the woman he married, and
Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations are
made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch's life. He
began to play at a new game. For a while he was
very proud of himself in the role of producing citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things
and played with realities. In the fall he voted at an
election and he had a newspaper thrown on his
porch each morning. When in the evening he came
home from work he got off a streetcar and walked
sedately along behind some business man, striving
to look very substantial and important. As a payer
of taxes he thought he should post himself on how
things are run. "I'm getting to be of some moment,
a real part of things, of the state and the city and
all that," he told himself with an amusing miniature
air of dignity. Once, coming home from Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train.
Enoch talked about the advisability of the government's owning and operating the railroads and the
man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that
such a move on the part of the government would
be a good thing, and he grew quite excited as he
talked. Later he remembered his own words with
pleasure. "I gave him something to think about, that
fellow," he muttered to himself as he climbed the
stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He
himself brought it to an end. He began to feel
choked and walled in by the life in the apartment,
and to feel toward his wife and even toward his
children as he had felt concerning the friends who
once came to visit him. He began to tell little lies
about business engagements that would give him
freedom to walk alone in the street at night and, the
chance offering, he secretly re-rented the room facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al Robinson
died on the farm near Winesburg, and he got eight
thousand dollars from the bank that acted as trustee
of her estate. That took Enoch out of the world of
men altogether. He gave the money to his wife and
told her he could not live in the apartment any
more. She cried and was angry and threatened, but
he only stared at her and went his own way. In
reality the wife did not care much. She thought
Enoch slightly insane and was a little afraid of him.
When it was quite sure that he would never come
back, she took the two children and went to a village
in Connecticut where she had lived as a girl. In the
end she married a man who bought and sold real
estate and was contented enough.
And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York
room among the people of his fancy, playing with
them, talking to them, happy as a child is happy.
They were an odd lot, Enoch's people. They were
made, I suppose, out of real people he had seen and
who had for some obscure reason made an appeal
to him. There was a woman with a sword in her
hand, an old man with a long white beard who went
about followed by a dog, a young girl whose stockings were always coming down and hanging over
her shoe tops. There must have been two dozen of
the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of
Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with him.
And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went
and locked the door. With an absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go
on making his living in the advertising place until
something happened. Of course something did happen. That is why he went back to live in Winesburg
and why we know about him. The thing that happened was a woman. It would be that way. He was
too happy. Something had to come into his world.
Something had to drive him out of the New York
room to live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure, bobbing up and down on the streets of an Ohio
town at evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of Wesley Moyer's livery barn.
About the thing that happened. Enoch told George
Willard about it one night. He wanted to talk to
someone, and he chose the young newspaper reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when the younger man was in a
mood to understand.
Youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the year's end,
opened the lips of the old man. The sadness was in
the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but it appealed to Enoch Robinson.
It rained on the evening when the two met and
talked, a drizzly wet October rain. The fruition of
the year had come and the night should have been
fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp
promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way.
It rained and little puddles of water shone under the
street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the
darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped
from the black trees. Beneath the trees wet leaves
were pasted against tree roots that protruded from
the ground. In gardens back of houses in Winesburg
dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on the
ground. Men who had finished the evening meal
and who had planned to go uptown to talk the evening away with other men at the back of some store
changed their minds. George Willard tramped about
in the rain and was glad that it rained. He felt that
way. He was like Enoch Robinson on the evenings
when the old man came down out of his room and
wandered alone in the streets. He was like that only
that George Willard had become a tall young man
and did not think it manly to weep and carry on.
For a month his mother had been very ill and that
had something to do with his sadness, but not
much. He thought about himself and to the young
that always brings sadness.
Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath
a wooden awning that extended out over the sidewalk before Voight's wagon shop on Maumee Street
just off the main street of Winesburg. They went
together from there through the rain-washed streets
to the older man's room on the third floor of the
Heffner Block. The young reporter went willingly
enough. Enoch Robinson asked him to go after the
two had talked for ten minutes. The boy was a little
afraid but had never been more curious in his life.
A hundred times he had heard the old man spoken
of as a little off his head and he thought himself
rather brave and manly to go at all. From the very
beginning, in the street in the rain, the old man
talked in a queer way, trying to tell the story of the
room in Washington Square and of his life in the
room. "You'll understand if you try hard enough,"
he said conclusively. "I have looked at you when
you went past me on the street and I think you can
understand. It isn't hard. All you have to do is to
believe what I say, just listen and believe, that's all
there is to it."
It was past eleven o'clock that evening when old
Enoch, talking to George Willard in the room in the
Heffner Block, came to the vital thing, the story of
the woman and of what drove him out of the city
to live out his life alone and defeated in Winesburg.
He sat on a cot by the window with his head in his
hand and George Willard was in a chair by a table.
A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room,
although almost bare of furniture, was scrupulously
clean. As the man talked George Willard began to
feel that he would like to get out of the chair and
sit on the cot also. He wanted to put his arms about
the little old man. In the half darkness the man
talked and the boy listened, filled with sadness.
"She got to coming in there after there hadn't
been anyone in the room for years," said Enoch
Robinson. "She saw me in the hallway of the house
and we got acquainted. I don't know just what she
did in her own room. I never went there. I think
she was a musician and played a violin. Every now
and then she came and knocked at the door and I
opened it. In she came and sat down beside me, just
sat and looked about and said nothing. Anyway, she
said nothing that mattered."
The old man arose from the cot and moved about
the room. The overcoat he wore was wet from the
rain and drops of water kept falling with a soft
thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot
George Willard got out of the chair and sat beside
him.
"I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the
room with me and she was too big for the room. I
felt that she was driving everything else away. We
just talked of little things, but I couldn't sit still. I
wanted to touch her with my fingers and to kiss
her. Her hands were so strong and her face was so
good and she looked at me all the time."
The trembling voice of the old man became silent
and his body shook as from a chill. "I was afraid,"
he whispered. "I was terribly afraid. I didn't want
to let her come in when she knocked at the door
but I couldn't sit still. 'No, no,' I said to myself, but
I got up and opened the door just the same. She
was so grown up, you see. She was a woman. I
thought she would be bigger than I was there in
that room."
Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his
childlike blue eyes shining in the lamplight. Again
he shivered. "I wanted her and all the time I didn't
want her," he explained. "Then I began to tell her
about my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep myself to
myself, but I couldn't. I felt just as I did about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go
away and never come back any more."
The old man sprang to his feet and his voice
shook with excitement. "One night something happened. I became mad to make her understand me
and to know what a big thing I was in that room. I
wanted her to see how important I was. I told her
over and over. When she tried to go away, I ran
and locked the door. I followed her about. I talked
and talked and then all of a sudden things went to
smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she
did understand. Maybe she had understood all the
time. I was furious. I couldn't stand it. I wanted her
to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her
understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out,
you see. That's how it is. I don't know why."
The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp
and the boy listened, filled with awe. "Go away,
boy," said the man. "Don't stay here with me any
more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you
but it isn't. I don't want to talk any more. Go away."
George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his voice. "Don't stop now. Tell
me the rest of it," he commanded sharply. "What
happened? Tell me the rest of the story."
Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the
window that looked down into the deserted main
street of Winesburg. George Willard followed. By
the window the two stood, the tall awkward boy-
man and the little wrinkled man-boy. The childish,
eager voice carried forward the tale. "I swore at
her," he explained. "I said vile words. I ordered her
to go away and not to come back. Oh, I said terrible
things. At first she pretended not to understand but
I kept at it. I screamed and stamped on the floor. I
made the house ring with my curses. I didn't want
ever to see her again and I knew, after some of the
things I said, that I never would see her again."
The old man's voice broke and he shook his head.
"Things went to smash," he said quietly and sadly.
"Out she went through the door and all the life
there had been in the room followed her out. She
took all of my people away. They all went out
through the door after her. That's the way it was."
George Willard turned and went out of Enoch
Robinson's room. In the darkness by the window,
as he went through the door, he could hear the thin
old voice whimpering and complaining. "I'm alone,
all alone here," said the voice. "It was warm and
friendly in my room but now I'm all alone."
The Teacher